Adventures with lightweight and minimalist software for Linux

blessed-contrib: A well-earned clamor

I’ve gotten three or four links to blessed-contrib in the past two weeks; thanks for the tips. Usually a quick flurry of attention like that means two things — first, that it appeared on a forum or in a news post somewhere, and second, that it probably is very good.

It seems the clamor is well-earned this time. Here’s the “example” arrangement.

The animation is missing there, which is a shame, because just about all of those little widgets have some sort of activity going. If you want to see the full effect, try the animated image on the Github page.

I haven’t said what blessed-contrib is, because it’s what you make it. This is a tool toward other things, and not so much an application on its own. So if you were expecting those little doo-dads to dial you into NORAD a laWarGames, it’s not going to happen … unless you can make it happen. 😯

It’s fun to tinker with blessed-contrib, but you will need a degree of programming ability and access to a few other ancillary projects — some of which, like spark, we’ve seen here.

I also feel obligated to mention that the effect was somewhat lost in a virtual console (on my Arch machine, anyway) because, as is wont to happen, some of the text shapes used in the graphs were inaccessible to the screen font. I’m sure there are ways to specify the exact characters used in those graphs, so you might want to keep that in mind if you decide to pull blessed-contrib into your next killer app for the console.

From what I gather, blessed-contrib is fairly new, and I see edits as recently as a few days ago. Ergo, this is not in Debian or Arch/AUR. If you want to give it a spin, I installed python-blessed out of AUR and nodejs from community, then followed the quick install instructions on the home page to get as far as the demonstration panel.